Thoughts on PTR Warrior Changes. Constructive

#0 - March 6, 2009, 9:03 p.m.

Arms
Battle Stance now increase the armor penetration of all your attacks by 10%.

I would imagine this is an attempt to help bring up the PVE Arms dps. I applaud. A nice start. Many of the bleeds and deep wound effects won't benefit from this, but MS/Exceute/ and Overpower will benefit nicely.

This does absolutely nothing for PvP, and I doubt it was designed to. I really hope that the pve arms rotation is not going to try to be applied to PvP. Keep the pvp core moves intact. Just buff the signature pvp moves that arms uses and the weapon specs.

Shattering Throw *New Skill* - Throws your weapon at the enemy causing [ 50% of AP + 12 ] damage (based on attack power), reducing the armor on the target by 20% for 10 sec, and removing any invulnerabilities. 25 Rage, 30 yd range, 1.5 sec cast, 5 min cooldown

Cool. PvP utility that we have been asking for.

Fury

Berserker Stance now increase all damage taken by 5% (Down from 10%)

Excellent. I would have preferred it down to 3% to bring it in line with the crit buff we receive but I'll take this as a start.

Protection

Defensive Stance now reduces damage caused by 5%. (Down from 10%)

Cool. It's not like we are damage powerhouses in Def stance anyway (except some prots with some ridiculous shield slams!)

Disarm now disarm the enemy's main hand and ranged weapons.

Ok, cool. A very situational pvp buff, but I'll take it.

Overall a good Start to fixing warriors in pvp. I still believe the TG nerf is a ridiculous nerf to our best pve and pvp tree, and unending fury should be simply nerfed to 1/2/3/4/5% increase so that our 51 pointer doesnt seem like a huge nerf, and makes getting better gear a task to help offset a talent(lol). I DIGRESS.

The devs promised more than these first changes, and I look forward to them. Good start to helping warrior pvp.

Ghostcrawler

#1 - March 6, 2009, 9:10 p.m.

Like I said in another thread, we'll see how the modified stance penalties work out. From a high-level design view, we would love to get rid of them. From a more nuts and bolts standpoint, it might take reworking the numbers on a lot of abilities to get it there. We're just going to have to see how it goes.

To answer a question that has been posed several times, you can use Shattering Throw in PvE. The armor reduction will work on bosses. We erred on the side of making the cooldown and cast time conservative. If nothing explodes with the introduction of the new ability, we'll consider changing the numbers in the future or add appropriate glyphs or talents to do so.

I know some of you just pull the other stances off of your bar in PvP (figuratively anyway), but some warriors do shift to Battle Stance when dealing with highly armored opponents, and you might be even more likely to do so with the armor pen and introduction of Shattering Throw. It will either break the immunity or remove the armor, not both.

Ghostcrawler

#36 - March 6, 2009, 10:08 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Is the armor pen from shattering throw going to stack with sunders etc.? If not, just make it apply 5 sunders. It's an insignificant buff PvE wise.

It stacks with sunder.

Q u o t e:
Are you pushing Arms towards Battle Stance in PvP or not?

A little. I would say what we're really doing is giving all types of warriors more situational reasons to go into Battle.

Q u o t e:
Seems somewhat lackluster, it's been agreed upon by most of the Warriors that Armor Penetration in its current state is pretty bad and down there in the pits with haste. Is there some sort of change to ArP that hasn't been announced yet?

It is in this build I believe. If not, then it is:

Armor Penetration Rating: All classes now receive 25% more benefit from Armor Penetration Rating.